Certainly the accusation is of people whom it is plausible to believe would act out beyond the understandings of the American way, but still we must limit ourselves to what is known-- the exchange BD cites may be what it purports to be, or it may be a completely insincere backpedal due to realizing that taking on a liberal legend like BW is not a good idea.

Certainly the accusation is of people whom it is plausible to believe would act out beyond the understandings of the American way, but still we must limit ourselves to what is known-- the exchange BD cites may be what it purports to be, or it may be a completely insincere backpedal due to realizing that taking on a liberal legend like BW is not a good idea.

Until he took to the airwaves, BW didn't seem to find the apology insincere.

I don't think that email exchange, if accurate exonerates Sperling and his boss.

Remember. The GOP operatives did NOT START this. Woodward did. He, who is hardly a conservative, who has been a big Washington insider for decades makes it very clear he saw this as a veiled threat. Than we have Lanny Davis come out publically and make the same case. And the rumor mill has it that others have also had the same experience.

The left wing political media complex is out in full throttle attacking Woodward. Like Sperling clearly without mistake as to meaning said, "you will regret" this.

So you and other libs can whitewash it. I think your post endorses Woodward's case.

In his forty years of reporting and journalism I don't think Woodward has made this case except probably going back to the Nixon era. He didn't back down than and I doubt he will now. The difference he was darling of the media then. Now HE is made the villain. You can't see the difference?

The slow slide toward state run mediaposted at 2:31 pm on March 2, 2013 by Jazz Shaw

In the aftermath of the increasing strange story about Bob Woodward being threatened by the White House, there seem to be a few competing entries in the, “what does it all mean” sweepstakes. There is clearly some debate over precisely how much of a “threat” it really was or was intended to be, but does that mean that it was a big nothingburger? Matt Lewis seems to be leaning that way, opining that we’ve all been played.

Sperling’s email eventually does say, “I know you may not believe this, but as a friend, I think you will regret staking out that claim.” But this is clearly not a veiled threat of retaliation, but rather a warning that the reporter was about to get the story wrong.

When Woodward tells of being warned he would “regret” challenging Obama, it sounds ominous. But if Politico’s reporting today is correct, it seems much more innocuous than that.

Looks like we were played.Matt makes a couple of points which I won’t argue with. Woodward, even in this late stage of his career, is still in the business of selling books. And controversy is good for sales. This isn’t to say he lit this particular fire intentionally to gin up some action, but it’s also not terribly difficult to imagine how he wouldn’t rush to douse the flames, either. And the relationship between the author and Sperling may indeed be a cordial, long standing one, leading the aide to feel comfortable tossing around some phrases he might have chosen more carefully in a public forum.

But does that mean this should all be tosses aside? Kathleen Parker has a different take on the subject this weekend, with a look through a longer lens at some trends in how the White House manages the lines of communications.

Understandably, everyday Americans may find this discussion too inside baseball to pay much mind. Why can’t the president play a little golf without a press gaggle watching? As for Woodward, it’s not as though the White House was threatening to bust his kneecaps.

Add to these likely sentiments the fact that Americans increasingly dislike the so-called mainstream media, sometimes for good reason. Distrust of media, encouraged by alternative media seeking to enhance their own standing, has become a tool useful to the very powers the Fourth Estate was constitutionally endowed to monitor. When the president can bypass reporters to reach the public, it is not far-fetched to imagine a time — perhaps now? — when the state controls the message. Her method of bringing blogging and other new media outlets into the mix is what makes this more of a valid discussion. The government is supposed to face the media as an opponent of sorts, trying to keep secrets while the media tries to expose them. When the media fell from grace and became distrusted by the public to do this important job, bloggers and other non-establishment entities stepped in to watch the watchers so to speak. But we need to remember that there are still key differences between social media and the mainstream.

Bloggers – at least the lion’s share of them – don’t have any direct access to the White House. (And the few exceptions who do are so far in the pockets of the administration that it’s not worth mentioning.) So they still rely on the mainstream White House press corps for all of the inside data. And rather than having the tools to challenge the administration directly, blogging quickly devolved into competing camps who almost exclusively challenged the media on the other side of the fence rather than scoring any points for transparency in government. Conservative bloggers take on MSBNC, liberals take on Fox. Does this somehow damage White House control of the message? Parker gets this part right.

This is no tempest in a teapot but rather the leak in the dike. Drip by drip, the Obama administration has demonstrated its intolerance for dissent and its contempt for any who stray from the White House script. Yes, all administrations are sensitive to criticism, and all push back when such criticism is deemed unfair or inaccurate. But no president since Richard Nixon has demonstrated such overt contempt for the messenger. And, thanks to technological advances in social media, Obama has been able to bypass traditional watchdogs as no other president has. I still don’t know why it’s important that reporters get to watch Barack Obama play golf with Tiger Woods. And Bob Woodward is still able to write anything he wants. But if that’s the standard we set, how much else goes on that we’re actually missing? And how much spin gets passed off as news? In the end, the Woodward story was about a lot more than just Bob selling a few more books. It serves as a reminder that state influence over the media remains a danger, just as the Founders knew it could be when they drafted the Bill of Rights.

I'm just finishing "The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers" By Richard McGregor. A great book I'd recommend for everyone here. One thing that stuck me was how much of a similar system the US under Buraq was growingto be to like modern China, the key differences being they have a better economy and it's easier to start a business there, and there is a state entity that formally manages the media rather than the ad hoc one created by our "jounolistic professionals".

I don't think that email exchange, if accurate exonerates Sperling and his boss.

Remember. The GOP operatives did NOT START this. Woodward did. He, who is hardly a conservative, who has been a big Washington insider for decades makes it very clear he saw this as a veiled threat. Than we have Lanny Davis come out publically and make the same case. And the rumor mill has it that others have also had the same experience.

The left wing political media complex is out in full throttle attacking Woodward. Like Sperling clearly without mistake as to meaning said, "you will regret" this.

So you and other libs can whitewash it. I think your post endorses Woodward's case.

In his forty years of reporting and journalism I don't think Woodward has made this case except probably going back to the Nixon era. He didn't back down than and I doubt he will now. The difference he was darling of the media then. Now HE is made the villain. You can't see the difference?

Or you choose not to?

1. Yes, the words are there, but the context implies an entirely different meaning.2. Liberal? Perhaps compared to the others on this forum, but hardly in the crappy way you mean it.

8-Year-Old Schania Burgess Has Literally Not Been Outside Since Oct. 29

February 28, 2013 7:24 PM

Schania Burgess, 8, has not been outside since Sandy hit because her building’s elevators are still not working. (credit: CBS 2)

NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — Recovery from Hurricane Sandy has been slow for lots of people in our area.

But for one little girl in Coney Island, the aftermath of the storm has left her trapped inside her apartment for months.

Schania Burgess, 8, is wheelchair-bound and has not been outside since Sandy hit.

Her mother said the elevators in their high-rise building on Surf Avenue and 24th Street have been out of order for months, leaving Schania a virtual prisoner in their third-floor apartment.

Burgess has not been able to go to school as a result and said she misses her friends and art class the most.

Instead, she is being home-schooled by an instructor.

As CBS 2′s Kristine Johnson reported, Schania’s mother said it’s very frustrating as a parent.

“As you could see, she’s in a wheelchair. You have to take her down the steps if you want to go outside and since the storm, like I said, she has not been outside at all,” Scherry Barnett said.

Adding insult to injury, Schania’s apartment is a duplex with the bedrooms downstairs. Since the elevators are not working, the little girl has to sleep on a cot next to the kitchen.

Scherry said she’s fed up with the building and wants to move to an apartment that’s “barrier free,” but she said it’s hard to find one for her and her four children.

CBS 2 tried to get in touch with the building’s management to find out when the elevators would be fixed. A building security guard asked CBS 2 to leave the premises and calls to the management office were not returned.

"Liberal? Perhaps compared to the others on this forum, but hardly in the crappy way you mean it."

FWIW CCP my spontaneous gut response to your comment was that I did not care for it-- and while I am at it. Though there are many points on which we don't quite see eye-to-eye, in my opinion BD is an honorable player in our conversations who brings quite a bit to the table and disagreements with him should reflect this.

I would add that I disagree with him here. Threats of denial of access, (especially for Woodward, who has enjoyed it in spades over the years) is a powerful threat and certainly plays a major role in the evolution of American media into the pravdas that they have become. I think GM's "Slow Slide" piece gets quite a bit right.

I think the Hot Air piece posted by GM is worth reading. And, Crafty, you are right: it does discuss important issues that should be addressed.

But, it's historical context is too short. The bit about bloggers is true because of the technology of the time, not the president. It was also true under Bush. It is also true that members of the press that questioned Bush's military strategy, as one example, were threatened with lack of access. I'm NOT saying that the Obama is right in this case (or others), but the example of BW is not the right fight.

When I discuss national security threats with students, I ask them to be reasonable about the definition, because if everything is included the definition loses its essential meaning.

So, F&F... a good fight, as I am pretty sure I've made clear consistently.Benghazi... maybe. In fact, likely.But Bob Woodward over-claiming a fight???

The single, overarching question, in my opinion, should be "Where is Congress?" It has consistently faded in the past 30 years, which allows presidents of both parties to accumulate power without cessation. If MOCs don't put party aside and focus on the institutional powers lost, ceded or stolen, at that some point there will be no way to return.

And that, if you look closely, has been a pretty consistent theme throughout my posts on this forum.

The purported full context of the email does place the two sentences that sound like threats open to interpretation. However, I think that the even larger context of Woodward's career, coupled with Davis' assertion he had the exact same concerns that this is not normal behavior coming from WH operatives. These Washington insiders both perceived this as some sort of threat.

There are myriad ways to make someone's life miserable without "breaking kneecaps".

It takes a lot of guts to go up against the WH. It is less plausible to think he made these public statements in order to sell more copies of his book.

Indeed, reading Sperling's long winded comments sound more like a desperate attempt to muzzle Woodward. And while he is trying hard to make nice to him Sperling slips and out of exasperation advertently or inadvertently makes it clear he ain't just begging Woodward to keep quiet. He will be sorry.

Bidog if your not a liberal - I apologize. If you are, I guess I could have called you worse. .... A Nazi....A Republican.

CCP, I love ya man, so please forgive me for being a hardass here, but the point is not the point of view, it is that BD conducts himself with intellectual integrity and contributes mightily to this forum.

Maybe the calling out of Obama by Woodward on the origin of the sequester means the honeymoon is finally over, 8 1/2 years after Obama's 2004 convention speech. It opens the door for pretend journalists to do real journalism and also for pretend comedians to do real comedy. They can start coming out and at least consider taking occasional shots at the administration if or when they seem warranted. Jon Stewart started to dabble in it.

I don't think you would see any of that at this point in the first term.

The 'threat' as CCP suggests does not mean break you knees regret. To Woodward they can't even take away all his access but they can throw up small roadblocks and hurdles. For a newer, younger reporter it means you go further in this town if you play ball with the right team. Criticism is fine, just keep it all over at Fox and Weekly Standard, etc.

Today I watched David Gregory follow tough questioning of Speaker of the House John Boehner with some far tougher than usual questions for his administration guest which happened to be Gene You-will-live-to-regret-this Sperling. Then gave him the opportunity to tell what a great, long relationship he has with Woodward. Still, I never heard him give good explanation to the "regret it" comment, nor back off of it.

Some stories are coming out about how Woodward isn't the greatest journalist...

I did not know until after the “I think you will regret staking out this claim” email that Bob Woodward isn't such a perfect journalist:

Looks like John Cassidy at the New Yorker had a well researched article about Woodward's alleged misses ready to go to print by Feb 28.

I didn't know about this Woodward scandal:

"In 1988, he published “Veil: The Secret Wars of the C.I.A., 1981-1987,” which contained his famous account of a deathbed conversation with William Casey, the former C.I.A. director. Casey, according to Woodward’s telling, admitted that he knew about the illegal diversion of monies from Iranian arms sales to the Nicaraguan Contras. “His head jerked up hard,” Woodward wrote. “He stared, and finally nodded yes.” “Why?” Woodward asked. Casey whispered, “I believed.” Did it happen like that? Even today, it’s a matter of dispute. In 2010, a former C.I.A. employee, who was part of Casey’s security detail, claimed Woodward “fabricated” the story after being turned away from Casey’s room at Georgetown University Hospital. Woodward dismissed the agent’s statement, saying agency guards were not present around the clock. Whatever the truth of this particular detail, there is no doubt that Woodward had a great deal of access to Casey. According to C.I.A. records, the director spoke with Woodward forty-three times while he was working on the book. Whether or not Casey coughed up the deathbed admission, “Veil” contains a wealth of previously undisclosed details about C.I.A. operations."

I didn't know about this criticism of Woodward:

The real rap on Woodward isn’t that he makes things up. It’s that he takes what powerful people tell him at face value; that his accounts are shaped by who coöperates with him and who doesn’t; and that they lack context, critical awareness, and, ultimately, historic meaning. In a 1996 essay for the New York Review of Books, Joan Didion wrote that “measurable cerebral activity is virtually absent” from Woodward’s post-Watergate books, which are notable mainly for “a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured.”

How many knew that Woodward's book about praising Greenspan as "Maestro" was so ill-timed:

"Woodward’s 2000 book on Alan Greenspan, “Maestro,” which was clearly based on extensive access to the Fed chairman, is a good example of what Didion was talking about. As an inside account of what Greenspan said and did and thought, it was a useful primer, and, as with all of Woodward’s books, it included some arresting, if largely irrelevant, narrative details, such as one in which the great man, disturbed by his wife, Andrea Mitchell’s, desire for a canine companion, asks one of his colleagues, the chairman of the Philadelphia Fed, “Well, how do you tell your wife you don’t want a dog?” But as a guide to the impact of Greenspan’s policies, or the real significance of his rise to a godlike status, “Maestro” wasn’t much help at all. Less than a year after it was published, the stock-market bubble that Greenspan had helped to inflate burst, and the country was plunged into a recession."

I know that this does not need repeating, but if this were a Republican administration, the media would be burning the Commander-in-Chief at the stake. Instead, these tools continue to polish his knob in an advanced case of Stockholm Syndrome. They sacrifice their integrity, their objectivity, and their principles for an enemy administration whose collectivist goals they share.

Any decent American journalist would have run the emails referred to in this article on the front page. But instead, they cover for the Stalinist tactics of the thug in the White House.

Where are those goosestepping feminazis?

Beat The Press NY Post, March 3, 212As coverage of last week’s flare-up between Bob Woodward and the White House devolved into the granular parsing of words and implications and extrapolations and possible intent, the larger point was roundly missed: the increasing pressure that White House correspondents feel when dealing with the Obama administration — to follow their narrative, to be properly deferential (!), to react to push-back by politely sitting down and shutting up.

“The whole Woodward thing doesn’t surprise me at all,” says David Brody, chief political correspondent for CBN News. “I can tell you categorically that there’s always been, right from the get-go of this administration, an overzealous sensitivity to any push-back from any media outlet.”

A brief recap: After the Washington Post ran a Woodward op-ed in which he claimed that the administration was “moving the goalposts” on the eve of the potential sequester, the veteran journalist went on to assert that economic adviser Gene Sperling said, in an e-mail, “I think you will regret staking out this claim.”

While Woodward spent a lot of the week on cable news going back and forth on whether that was a threat, few reporters, if any, asked why a high-level administration official spent so much time — Sperling admittedly shouted at Woodward during a 30-minute phone call, followed by that e-mail — attempting to control an opinion expressed in a newspaper.

The answer, say former and current White House correspondents, is simple: This administration is more skilled and disciplined than any other in controlling the narrative, using social media to circumnavigate the press. On the flip side, our YouTube culture means even the slightest gaffe can be devastating, and so you have an army of aides and staffers helicoptering over reporters.

Finally, this week, reporters are pushing back. Even Jonathan Alter — who frequently appears on the Obama-friendly MSNBC — came forward to say he, too, had been treated horribly by the administration for writing something they didn’t like.

“There is a kind of threatening tone that, from time to time — not all the time — comes out of these guys,” Alter said this week. During the 2008 campaign swing through Berlin, Alter said that future White House press secretary Robert Gibbs disinvited him from a dinner between Obama and the press corps over it.

“I was told ‘Don’t come,’ in a fairly abusive e-mail,” he said. “[It] made what Gene Sperling wrote [to Woodward] look like patty-cake.”

“I had a young reporter asking tough, important questions of an Obama Cabinet secretary,” says one DC veteran. “She was doing her job, and they were trying to bully her. In an e-mail, they called her the vilest names — bitch, c--t, a--hole.” He complained and was told the matter would be investigated: “They were hemming and hawing, saying, ‘We’ll look into it.’ Nothing happened.”

Posted by Pamela Geller on Sunday, March 03, 2013 at 10:23 PM in Obama's 2nd Term

Logged

"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

The absurdity of this decision is explained by the fact that both Geller and Spencer have been highly critical of Grover Norquist, who sits on the board of the organization that puts on this conference. Despite the fact that for the last 3 years these two have had a standing-room-only audience, Grover Norquist and his lackey Suhail Khan (a Muslim Brotherhood operative) want to silence both Geller and Spencer. Norquist has been responsible for multiple Muslim Brotherhood-connected individuals infiltrating the highest levels of our government, and very few Republicans - such as Michele Bachmann and her co-signers - have raised any questions about this. Norquist is untouchable in their minds. Frank Gaffney has also exposed Norquists nefarious activities along these lines at his site - Center for Security Policy. He has a whole video series detailing the infiltration.

The irony of all this is that a poll sent out to CPAC attendees this year which asked which of 20 conservative web sites was their favorite, resulted in a huge margin of victory for Robert Spencer's www.jihadwatch.org. Spencer intends to attend to receive his award, and hopes to have the opportunity to greet both Norquist and Khan, who evidently despise him and Geller - for obvious reasons.

Logged

"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

From NewsweekThe Myth of Bob Woodward: Why Is This Man an American Icon?

“Some of their writing is not true,” ... “They’re wrong often on detail”..."If there was any doubt that Bob Woodward’s ego is out of control, inviting the president to his house should put those doubts to rest.".-----

4 internet pages about problems with Woodward's previous work. He was really a hack, one might take from this.

"How accurate is his reporting? Does he deserve his legendary status? I believe I can offer some interesting answers to those questions."..."he’d put down the mechanics of the story more or less as they’d happened. But he’d so mangled the meaning and the context that his version had nothing to do with what I concluded had actually transpired.""The wrongness in Woodward’s reporting is always ever so subtle.""Again, Woodward’s account is not wrong. It’s just … wrong.""Like a funhouse mirror, Woodward’s prose distorts what it purports to reflect.""Bob Woodward, deploying all of the talent and resources for which he is famous, produced something that is a failure as journalism."

The liberal media know an abortion outrage when they hear it. Sadly they only seem to hear them from the mouths of Republican candidates, and it only takes a statement to outrage the press. Can’t they find a single abortion outrage inside an abortion clinic? Such is their radicalism that nothing, absolutely nothing regarding this gruesome procedure raises their eyebrows, never mind their ire.

One emerging story proves the degree to which our “objective” media's views on abortion are dogmatic and extreme. Abortionist Kermit Gosnell is on trial in Philadelphia, and not just for killing babies outside the womb, but also for killing a mother through reckless use of anesthesia. Network TV coverage of the trial? Zero on ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, NPR, and PBS. CNN’s entire coverage seems to be one sentence from Jake Tapper on March 21.

The New York Times wrote one story before the trial began on March 19 (buried on page A-17). The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today couldn’t be “national” newspapers and report this trial.

They’re not unaware of it. CBS aired one story after the initial clinic raid in 2011. NBC offered 50 words. CBS even passed along that Gosnell's clinic was described as a "house of horrors." Now it’s in court, and the networks can't find any horrors.

Take the Associated Press report, which appeared on CBSNews.com: “The amount of drugs given to Karnamaya Mongar -- at least as suggested by the nearly illegible clinic note -- was likely to put her in a coma,” said Dr. Andrew Herlich, a medical-school professor.

Mongar was a very sympathetic figure. A native of Bhutan, she weighed less than 100 pounds, spoke no English, and had lived for decades in refugee camps in Nepal before coming to America four months before her death. But the storyline wasn’t lining up with the media’s feminist prejudices. Their “war on women” narrative didn’t include her.

I'll give you a story that falls in line with the media's narrative supporting the plight of women: on November 14, 2012, NBC News aired a report from Ireland, where Indian immigrant Savita Halapanavar died of blood poisoning after seeking an abortion. NBC blamed the government, because the woman and her husband “pleaded for an abortion but were refused because the fetus still had a heartbeat. This is a Catholic country, they were told.”

NBC never returned to the story as hospital officials reported previous “terminations” to save the mother’s life and denied a “Catholic ethos.” To listen to this network is to conclude that abortionists don’t kill women. Catholics do.

You can also see the anti-Catholic animus determining which trials are newsworthy in Philadelphia. On May 23, 2012, the “CBS Evening News” began with the trial of Monsignor William Lynn, accused of covering up child sexual abuse in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Scott Pelley wasn’t shy about letting the prosecutor speak, as she compared the Catholic Church to the Nazis at Nuremberg.

But when a pro-lifer uses Holocaust metaphors for an abortion clinic, he is condemned.

The trial testimony is graphic, and should make “choice” advocates sick to their stomachs. Again, see the AP: “A medical assistant told a jury Tuesday that she snipped the spines of at least 10 babies during unorthodox abortions at a West Philadelphia clinic, at the direction of the clinic’s owner."

Later, AP mangled the medical facts: “Abortions are typically performed in utero.” When babies are killed over a toilet, as alleged in this trial, this is not an “unorthodox abortion” of a “fetus.” This is a baby who is born and then murdered. Liberals claim to revere “science,” but this trial is not about tiny “zygotes.” It’s about viable babies.

It gets more grotesque at every turn. Clinic assistant Adrienne Moton testified she took a photo of the child described as “Baby A” with her cell phone before Dr. Gosnell took the baby out of the room. "I just saw a big baby boy. He had that color, that color that a baby has," Moton said in court. "I just felt he could have had a chance.…He could have been born any day.”

Another Gosnell assistant said the abortionist joked about one child he murdered: “This baby is big enough to walk around with me or walk me to the bus stop.” But AP reported that Gosnell sits serenely in the courtroom, undisturbed by the accusations.

He's not alone. ABC, CBS, and NBC piled up 96 stories on Todd Akin’s medically inept comments on rape and abortion, and also wallowed in outrage over Richard Mourdock’s remarks on God’s will and a child conceived in rape. Their pro-life rhetoric was sold as a major scandal. It’s unbelievable that Dr. Gosnell’s trial for his actions inside his “house of horrors” haven't drawn one network story.

File this in the overflowing cabinet labeled: No Wonder the Mainstream Media Is Dying. On Tuesday, the Associated Press announced that it is banishing the phrase "illegal immigrant" from its famous stylebook. The world's largest newsgathering outlet now advises reporters that "illegal" will "only refer to an action, not a person."

File this in the overflowing cabinet labeled: No Wonder the Mainstream Media Is Dying. On Tuesday, the Associated Press announced that it is banishing the phrase "illegal immigrant" from its famous stylebook. The world's largest newsgathering outlet now advises reporters that "illegal" will "only refer to an action, not a person."

Illegal alien is the actual term used in federal law. I prefer "criminal invader" myself.

Gosnell abortion-clinic worker: One of the babies “sounded like a little alien”

posted at 4:01 pm on April 9, 2013 by Allahpundit

Unimaginable.

A Delaware woman who worked for Kermit Gosnell testified Tuesday that she was called back to a room at his abortion clinic in Philadelphia where the bodies of aborted babies were kept on a shelf to hear one screaming amid the bodies of aborted babies kept on a shelf…

“I can’t describe it. It sounded like a little alien,” West said, telling the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas judge and jury that the body of the child was about 18 to 24 inches long and was one of the largest babies she had seen delivered during abortion procedures at the Women’s Medical Society clinic…

West, who said she called aborted babies “specimens” because “it was easier to deal with mentally,” said a co-worker had called her back to the room that night because she did not know what to do. West said the baby’s eyes and mouth were not yet completely formed and it was lying on a glass tray on a shelf and she told the co-worker to call Gosnell and fled the room…

She later made it clear that she called it “a baby” in her testimony “because that is what it is.”

That’s not the first time a clinic worker’s resorted to Orwellian euphemisms to make her “work” more bearable. Ed e-mails to remind me that you’ll also find “Product of Conception” in usage. More on Gosnell from NBC Philadelphia, one of the precious few media outlets covering this story:

An unlicensed medical school graduate delivered graphic testimony about the chaos at a Philadelphia clinic where he helped perform late-term abortions.

Stephen Massof described how he snipped the spinal cords of babies, calling it, “literally a beheading. It is separating the brain from the body.” He testified that at times, when women were given medicine to speed up their deliveries, “it would rain fetuses. Fetuses and blood all over the place.”

The Anchoress notes correctly that, simply for reasons of sensationalism, the media should be all over this story. Dead children, body parts, harrowing testimony on the stand — even the most soulless news editor, untroubled by the horror-movie accusations against Gosnell, should be pushing heavy coverage for selfish reasons, to boost readership. (Britain’s Daily Mail, whose tabloid instincts are unerring, has posted several stories about it.) Out of curiosity, I skimmed the last week’s results for “Kermit Gosnell” on Google News to see what turned up among major U.S. media. I found a few articles from local Philadelphia and Delaware outlets, a couple of AP items picked up by ABC, a Mona Charen op-ed carried in the Chicago Sun-Times, and … that’s basically it. There’s no explanation for the omission except one, just as there’s no explanation for ignoring Mark Mattioli in the Newtown coverage except one, just as there’s no explanation for disinterest in the Salmon family’s saga except one.

I’m left feeling about media bias the way I felt yesterday about dynastic politics: It seems like it’s getting worse, especially their willingness to completely black out “unhelpful” stories or parts of a story rather than simply spin them away, but there’s no way to know without hard numbers. Nate Silver’s right: The world needs fewer pundits and more data-crunchers. Here’s fertile ground for the latter. Exit question from Mark Steyn: “So how many dead American babies does it take to make the news?”

For the past couple of weeks there has been a steady drip of bad news for ObamaCare, but you wouldn't know it if you only get your news from the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) networks. From a Society of Actuaries report that determined premium costs will shoot up thanks to a thirty-three percent average increase in claims; to thirty-three Senate Democrats joining Republicans in voting to repeal an ObamaCare tax on medical devices; to a Quinnipiac University poll showing even two-thirds of self-identified Democrats saying the law will either hurt them or have no effect, the recent news has been bad for the President's chief legislative victory. However, not one of these trouble spots for ObamaCare has been mentioned on ABC, CBS or NBC's evening or morning show broadcasts.

The following setbacks for ObamaCare haven't received a single second of air time on the Big Three networks:

■ On March 22, ObamaCare hit a major snag when even 33 Senate Democrats openly defied the President as they joined 45 Republicans in voting to repeal a 2.3 percent sales tax, crucial to paying for ObamaCare, on medical devices such as pacemakers and MRI machines. The measure was co-sponsored by liberal Minnesota Democrat Amy Klobuchar, who said in a statement that she would "continue to work to get rid of this harmful tax."

Big Three coverage 0 stories.

■ On March 26, the Society of Actuaries, released a study that determined health claims will increase by an average of 32 percent with some states seeing claims rise as much as 80 percent. The study estimated that states will now have to double their health spending to cover the millions of the previously uninsured. The study went on to report that claims will be driven higher because many employers will stop covering their employees once Obamacare is instituted and those workers will be more expensive to insure than those already in the individual market.

Big Three coverage: 0 stories.

■ On March 26, Obama's own Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius admitted that premiums will rise for some people buying new insurance policies in the coming fall, because of ObamaCare requirements. As the March 26 Wall Street Journal reported: "The secretary's remarks are among the first direct statements from federal officials that people who have skimpy health plans right now could face higher premiums for plans that are more generous."

Big Three coverage: 0 stories

■ On April 3 Fox News reported that the Obama administration admitted a system of exchanges designed to make it simpler for small businesses to provide health insurance, the very core of ObamaCare's promise, will be delayed an entire year. According to Jim Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center this is a huge setback because: "Lots of small businesses struggle with providing insurance for their workers so this was supposed to facilitate it and make it easier for small business to do this," and added: "It was a huge portion of the sale job. When they passed the law in 2010 there were many senators and members of Congress who were saying 'I am doing this because it's going to help small businesses.'"

Big Three coverage: 0 stories.

■ On April 4 Quinnipiac University released a poll showing that even two-thirds of Democrats now believe Obama's health care reforms will either hurt them personally or have no effect on their daily lives, vs. 27% of Democrats who believed they would be helped. Overall, only 15% of voters think ObamaCare will mostly help them personally, vs. 78% who expect it to hurt them or have no effect.

Big Three coverage: 0 stories.

OTOH, ABC had time for this on hairstyle: "Michelle Obama making headlines again for her bangs."

Remember how the New York Times featured Bill Ayers on September 11, 2001 saying he regretted having not engaged in more domestic terrorist activity? Well, the Los Angeles Times tried to complete with the NY Times on Monday, with this headline and story: “With Al Qaeda Shattered, U.S. Counter-Terrorism’s Future Unclear.”

We are hardly the first – and will not be the last – to note the abhorrent double standard in the establishment media about the killing of innocent children....Most abortion clinics are nothing like Gosnell’s. But then, most gun owners are nothing like Adam Lanza. And Gosnell might not be quite so isolated as some would like to think. Just recently, whistleblowers stepped forward with accusations about dangerously unsanitary conditions at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Delaware.

What’s more, a few days ago, a Planned Parenthood lobbyist in Florida would not say that a baby born alive at an abortion clinic should receive medical treatment. (more at link)

Editorial Page Editor Paul Gigot's nominating letter: (Gigot won this award in 2000; his predecessor Robert Bartley won it in 1980.)

To the Judges:Bret Stephens, the Wall Street Journal’s Global View columnist, is a conservative thinker with a contrarian bent. Though his main focus is foreign policy, he wanders far and wide with an eclectic mind that is impossible to stereotype and forces readers to think.Millions of column inches were published on the 2012 election, yet readers could have saved themselves much time and effort if they had read only Bret’s bookend pieces in January and November. “The GOP Deserves to Lose” on Jan. 24 lamented the state of the Republican presidential field, including front-runner Mitt Romney: “Thus the core difference between Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama: For the governor, the convictions are the veneer. For the president, the pragmatism is. Voters always see through this. They usually prefer the man who stands for something.” After the election he could claim vindication, and he did, in a lacerating column that upset many Journal readers but has contributed to some Republican rethinking on immigration and gay marriage.

In 2012, Bret also dared to challenge the conventional applause for Condoleezza Rice as a potential vice presidential candidate, and he defended his liberal competitor, Fareed Zakaria, against conservatives who wanted to run him out of journalism for a plagiarism slip. In an age when many ideological combatants relish and celebrate the mistakes of their competitors, Bret’s generosity was notable and a contribution to civil discourse.

His column on “Muslims, Mormons and Liberals” (Sept. 18) highlighted the hypocrisy of people who have no problem mocking one religious group in a Broadway musical but become indignant about other crude religious satires. “It need be said that the whole purpose of free speech is to protect unpopular, heretical, vulgar and stupid views,” Stephens wrote about the administration’s condemnation of the YouTube video on Mohammed. “So far, the Obama administration’s approach to free speech is that it’s fine so long as it’s cheap and exacts no political price. This is free speech as pizza.”

Bret has a particular talent for bringing humanity into his writing about geopolitics. That talent came through movingly in his columns about Sergei Magnitsky in “Russia’s Steve Biko” (March 27) and Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo in “Who Will Tell the Truth About China?” (Feb. 14).

Bret’s columns are among the most popular at the Journal, and my own reporting suggests they are also among the most influential. That influence showed in his two December columns on Susan Rice, which helped to focus opposition to her possible choice as the next Secretary of State. The pieces were not welcome at the White House but they helped to convince Ms. Rice and President Obama that she would face a withering confirmation fight, and she withdrew from consideration.

As for his prose, my own view is that Mr. Stephens writes as well as any columnist in America. I can’t think of a columnist who had a better year.Sincerely,Paul Gigot

It has now been revealed that the Boston Marathon bombers were two Muslims from southern Russia near Chechnya: Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who was killed in a firefight with Massachusetts police early this morning, and his brother Dzhokhar, who as of this writing is still at large.

As more and more material comes to light about the pair, their motivations become clear. On a Russian-language social media page, Dzhokhar features a drawing of a bomb under the heading “send a gift,” and just above links to sites about Islam. Tamerlan’s YouTube page features two videos by Sheikh Feiz Mohammed. According to a report published in The Australian in January 2007, in a video that came to the attention of authorities at the time, Mohammed “urges Muslims to kill the enemies of Islam and praises martyrs with a violent interpretation of jihad.”

Tamerlan also says, “I’m very religious.” He notes that he does not drink alcohol because Allah forbids it: “God said no alcohol,” and that his Italian girlfriend has converted to Islam. Even his name indicates the world from which he comes: Tamerlan Tsarnaev is apparently named for the Muslim warrior Tamerlane. Andrew Bostom wrote in 2005 that “Osama bin Laden was far from the first jihadist to kill infidels as an expression of religious piety….Osama lacks both Tamerlane’s sophisticated (for his time) military forces and his brilliance as a strategist. But both are or were pious Muslims who paid homage to religious leaders, and both had the goal of making jihad a global force.”

Combine all that with the fact that the bombs were similar to IED’s that jihadis use in Afghanistan and Iraq, and that Faisal Shahzad, who tried to set off a jihad car bomb in Times Square jihad car bomber, used a similar bomb, and that instructions for making such a bomb have been published in al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine, and the motivations of the Tsarnaev brothers are abundantly clear. It is increasingly likely also that they were tied in somehow to the international jihad network, as is indicated by how they fought off Boston police early on Friday with military-grade explosives – where did they get those? And where did they get the military training that they reportedly have, and displayed in several ways during the fight Friday morning?

Yet despite all this, the mainstream media continues to obfuscate the truth. NBC doesn’t see fit to mention any of the brothers’ connections to Islam in their profile of them. CNN warns that “it should not be assumed that either brother was radicalized because of their Chechen origins.” And this, of course, follows days of speculation about how the bombings appeared to be the work of “right-wing extremists,” “Tea Partiers,” and the like. According to Victor Medina in the Examiner, “Esquire Magazine’s Charles P. Pierce attempted to link the bombings to right wing extremists similar to Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. In another, CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen speculated that the type of bomb device could link it to right wing extremist groups.” Salon hoped that the bomber would turn out to be a “white American.”

Will Pierce, Bergen, and all the others who offered similar analyses apologize now? They almost certainly will not – and even worse, they will not be held accountable. No matter how often mainstream analysts are wrong, they never get questioned or jettisoned.

But in one sense, they were right: the bombers were indeed white, if not American. That demonstrates once and for all the vacuity of the mainstream media and Islamic supremacist claim that opposing jihad and Islamic supremacism is “racism.” Islam is not a race, and the massacre of innocent civilians is not a race. Opposing jihad is not racism, but the defense of freedom. The Tsarnaev brothers have confirmed that. However, nothing is more certain than that next week, Islamic supremacist and Leftist spokesmen will be featured on NBC and CNN decrying “racism” and an imagined “backlash” against innocent Muslims, which is always a feature of mainstream media coverage after a jihad attack, even though the “backlash” itself never actually materializes.

And there will be no accountability for that nonsense, either. Nowadays, it’s much more of a path to success to be politically correct than to be correct.

Logged

"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

I watched CBS interrupt prime time last night to exploit, I mean, cover this. The anchor was just puzzled. Can you think of, he asked every guest, any reason they would do this, even after identifying the accused as being Islamic extremists. It went on for most of the evening. Maybe they could have done a re-cap of all the other similar attacks - there is a pattern here, or read the words in the Koran inspiring it, or quoted the promotion of these types of attacks in the Mosques, rather than endlessly ask the question only of people they know won't answer.

Our Obj (and others) could have pointed him to guests that have a theory (see previous post in this thread), if that is what they wanted.

Michael Chertoff and Dallas Lawrence: Investigating Terror in the Age of Twitter After an arrest was reported in error, Boston police quickly knocked it down online..By MICHAEL CHERTOFF AND DALLAS LAWRENCE WSJ

In an incredibly short span of five days last week, America went from a nation under attack by terrorists to one made proud as law-enforcement agencies quickly identified the suspected Boston bombers and tracked them down. The attack, the investigation, the manhunt and the swift resolution were unprecedented. So too was the way that law enforcement employed digital tools to do its job.

A dozen years ago when the terrorists struck on 9/11, there was no Facebook FB +0.39%or Twitter or i-anything on the market. Cellphones were relatively common, but when cell networks collapsed in 2001, many people were left disconnected and wanting for immediate answers. Last week in Boston, when mobile networks became overloaded following the bombings, the social-media-savvy Boston Police Department turned to Twitter, using the platform as a makeshift newsroom to alert media and concerned citizens to breaking news.

Law-enforcement agencies around the world will note how social media played a prominent role both in telling the story and writing its eventual conclusion. Some key lessons have emerged.

One is that misinformation—always the bane of law enforcement during emergencies—now spreads instantaneously. Boston police, recognizing the problem, took to social media to correct the record quickly. Early in the investigation, on Wednesday last week, news outlets such as CNN incorrectly reported that an arrest had been made. The story appeared at 1:46 p.m. ET on CNN's blog and was tweeted minutes later. Tens of thousands of social-media posts quickly shared the news of the arrest, and word was spread further through cable-news broadcasts. This was one of many inaccurate reports that spread across the Internet.

Within the hour, the Boston Police Department Twitter handle (@Boston_Police) posted a tweet correcting the media's claims. The tweet generated more than 10,500 shares on Twitter, ensuring that the mistaken arrest report lost steam. The episode established the BPD's social-media channels as the go-to source for authoritative information that transformed media coverage of the bombing investigation from that point forward. News outlets even took to re-tweeting the police department's posts.

Boston police didn't just use social media to correct errors. The department recognized that the news media were starved for information as the investigation continued. The traditional periodic law-enforcement news conference isn't enough to feed the news cycle—which is not so much 24/7 as 1,440, the number of minutes in a day.

Media outlets hunger for news updates, videos and short 140-character quotes to fuel their own social and digital channels. The flow of information from the Boston police discouraged the media's overreliance on unofficial sources.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the bombing investigation was the way that law enforcement employed social media to actually aid the investigation, not merely to manage the news and inform the public. Moments after photos and video of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects were posted to FBI.gov, the government's website nearly crashed from the crush of visitors. BPD posted all of the official photos and video to social media to compensate for the lagging website and to encourage their online distribution. Many people shared these posts online—with some posts re-tweeted 16,000 to 17,000 times.

Each one of these "shares" on social media increased the visibility of the pictures and video that were key to identifying and locating the suspects—and to letting the suspects know that their images were everywhere. That knowledge is likely what prompted the Tsarnaev brothers to bolt from hiding.

The ubiquity of social media had its unsettling effect on law enforcement agencies during the investigation. Police departments across the country are by now well aware that criminals use social media too, whether bragging about crimes on Twitter or even posting YouTube videos that ultimately prove helpful to prosecutors.

Early Friday morning, some Boston-area residents began sharing details of the investigation they gathered by listening to police scanners on social media. As the search continued, people also posted photos and videos marking the location of law enforcement. These folks might have thought their posts were harmless or even somehow helpful, but they could have provided suspects with information they needed to evade law enforcement. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, after all, was on Twitter in the days following the bombing.

During the search for Tsarnaev, Boston police went on social-media outlets to post requests that the public "not compromise officer safety/tactics by broadcasting live video of officers while approaching search locations." Almost instantly, major media outlets from MSNBC to Fox News began admonishing their on-air guests to avoid mentioning specific details of the hunt.

The Boston Marathon bombing was a horrific crime, but it offered many lessons for law enforcement and for the country. Some of them were reminders of what we knew too well in the aftermath of 9/11—that militant Islam, for instance, wants to spill blood in America by any means possible. But some of the lessons were new ones. Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis and his department set a social-media standard for security emergencies that will benefit law-enforcement agencies everywhere, and the people they serve.

Mr. Chertoff, former secretary of Homeland Security in the George W. Bush administration, is chairman of the Chertoff Group, a security-advisory firm. Mr. Lawrence, chief global digital strategist for Burson-Marsteller, was a spokesman for the military coalition in Iraq during the Bush administration.

Anyone else here find the White House correspondents dinner is a disgusting show of corruption in Washington? Is there ever going to be a President who will be above this and refuse to show up? Or are they all afraid of media blowback?